D&D at 50 (While it's still at 50)

The end of the year is rapidly approaching - this is not my annual year end/new year's post - this is to get in something about Dungeons & Dragons 50th anniversary before the chance is gone.

The game appeared back in 1974, those three little books in a box. Was it a big deal? In a modest way, I think it was, even in 1974. It was different - not a war game as such, though rooted in war games; a game where you played a person involved in some kind of hazardous endeavor, set in a fantasy world. From what I have read, the first people playing it were still thinking more like war games - only war games where you played a single person (who might lead an army) - doing things people did in most games. accumulating wealth, defeating enemies, and so on. There were differences - the game was explicitly cooperative (though still competitive) - you worked with other players, as much as against them. And the structure was there for a lot more - for playing characters doing anything - crawling through dungeons? fighting in wars? flying into space? surviving a zombie attack? gunfights on western streets? And for changing the tone - to more talk, more intrigue, more comedy or horror or whatever you could think of. Over the next couple years, games started to appear taking up these possibilities. Soon, there were role playing games everywhere, doing everything. But that's to come.

As for me? Like most people I started with D&D. In 1982, at college, Advanced D&D, playing Leif and Roulard, along with two or three other players, going through a generic dungeon. There was a magic pool, one of the other player's characters disappeared, and when he came back, he did something stupid that angered someone else in the party. We grabbed him - he kicked poor Leif where Leifson would would have come from - and rolled a 20. We all laughed, the DM rolled to see how bad it was - he too rolled a 20 to confirm the crit. That was the end of Leif's dynastic hopes.

I was hooked. I don't know about the other player, whose characters was promptly and horribly murdered for this dastardly deed - though this was the first time we'd played the game, no one was too attached, and we were all laughing our heads off. This was fun! When I went home from college, I discovered that my brothers had D&D books as well - we started playing, and kept on playing to this very day. Well - there have been some gaps in there. After college, I didn't play much at all; by the 90s, all of us had stopped, and didn't pick it up until 3rd Edition came out. We didn't play that, exactly - but I played with it - bought lots of books, made up lots of characters. Then 4th came out and we played that a lot (though without loving it) - and when 5th came out, we picked it up like it was 1984 again. 

And now it is 2024, there is a revised version of 5th out - I have the first two books, but beyuond playing around with the PHB when I got it, I have not touched it. I have a copy of the DMG and have not opened it. It is a fact that I don't care very much anymore about D&D. I discovered, and finally played, skill games - Traveller and Call of Cthulhu, specifically - and have not looked back. WOTC has done plenty to help thsi alienation along, but it's mostly the type of game and the genre - I don't like level/class games as much anymore; and I don't really care about high fantasy. So here I am. This is not enough to stop me from playing the game, when I am in a game; and probably won't last forever - but there it is. 

But D&D has been a big deal - for me, as well as the world. I don't write blogs very much anymore, and have not said anything all year - though I thought about it off and on. But I have time to fix it. So - happy birthday D&D! and - before I go - here is how I would rank the versions of the game I have actually played. That would be a bit of Moldvay basic, ADD, a bit of 2E. 3E, 4E and 5E. I have in fact played the 2024 version of 5E, though not enough to see how to distinguish it from 2014 5. So I will leave it alone for now. and so? here they are, ranked.

1. Fifth Edition - this is, in the end, the best they have ever done. A rare instance of an upgrade that really is better than whan came before. Rare for D&D, as you'll see in this little list. But even if I have soured a bit on D&D generally, and even if in getting huge it has engendered a lot of backlash - this is still the best version of the game there is. Easy enough to play, especially easy if you're used to the older versions, and - to me - gives the sense of playing those early versions, but done right. No more weird charts and tables - simple math. In truth, for us, 5E feels like how 1E felt - it plays like we played at the table. We dropped most of the oddball war game stuff - we played ADD like 5E. 5E just makes it all core to the game. It really is a good game.

2. AD&D, First Edition - Gary Gygax unfiltered! It's what I learned on - whatever the difficulties fo the game, we played it easily enough - we were more than happy to fill in anything we were missing or change what we didn't like - I am always shocked to learn that critical hits and fumbles were not in ADD, because we always played with hem from the beginning. Things like that. As a game - 5E is a simpler, more elegant version of this. As a publication, on the other hand, this eclipses everything else by miles. Sure, it's what I learned on, but it really did have the best books, as books, the best art, the best ideas - everything. I can still leaf through those early books - the core books, obviously, but even later additions like Deities & Demigods or the Fiend Folio - just to look at the art. Just to look for the jokes. It was a great edition. 

3. Third Edition - truth is, I barely played this thing, but this was the great solitaire edition. It's publication drew us back to D&D; we never quite figured out how to play it, but I bought most of the books (3 and 3.5 both), read them, used them - and made up characters. This is maybe the only version fo D&D where making up characters is in itself a satisfying game - it's got a bit of that Traveller vibe, where building a character is a game in itself. Doesn't have the dice, but it has the options and the ability to craft someone you can believe in. If you divide games into games as games and games as models - this is the model version of the game. You could use it to make up people you could imagine being alive in a world. Even the best other versions don't quite make up characters that have all the details of a character from a book. You can almost get there with 3. I liked it, even if I didn't really play it.

4. Fourth Edition - the exact opposite. We played this a lot - because this is a really good board game. Is it D&D? I don't really think so - even in the broad sense that Pathfinder or Shadowdark or whatever are really D&D - this is something else. That kind of hrumphing probably needs some definitions - this might not be the time, but at it's core: D&D requires a fantasy setting (swords and sorcery, magic and monsters, etc), a D20 system - and role playing. And role playing for me means that you imagine yourself as a real actual person in a real actual world. And 4th edition did not deliver that. I could not imagine 4E characters as people; could not imagine 4E fights and encounters as something actual people were doing. PCs were pieces on a board. Now - you could imagine them as people, and you could go through the motions of a D&D game - but you can imagine the shoe as a real character in Monopoly - it doesn't make it an RPG. All told - 4E was a pretty good game, fun, easy to play - but it did not scratch the itch D&D scratched, and when 5E came out we dropped it on the spot.

5. Second Edition - these last two aren't really being ranked the same way. I barely played 2E - when I did play it, I took ADD character sheets, added THACO and a couple non-weapon proficiencies and played - ADD, as far as I could tell. So - all there is to distinguish the versions is THACO, significantly less interesting core products, a line of fantastic supplements (arms and Equipment, Castles and Strongholds, or whatever that thing was called, etc) - and some great settings, I never really played with. Very much an afterthought.

6. Moldvay Basic - the only basic I played, and this, again, barely, and as an adjunct to ADD. I had played ADD; my brothers had played Basic/Expert and had the books. WE ended up playing a ocuple dungeons using the basic books, and a hodge podge of basic and ADD characters. Then got the ADD books and that was all. I have no feel for what any of the basic games played like. If I had found them first, I might have loved htem - though not necessarily. I was more a war gamer than RPG gamer in college - my joy was in things like Squad Leader and Kingmaker and War and Peace - I liked big complicated things. ADD hit me square; I am not sure if a simpler version of the game would have. Still - this is just to say I have played something with these rules, nothing at all like a real assessment. 

And there it is. That's what I have played; that is what I think of them. I could add things like - favorite book - ADD Dungeon Master's Guide. Best art - I mean, again - ADD - especially the PHB cover, which is so fantastic. Favorite monster - shoot: drow? githyanki? might be. They were right there. Favorite character? Probably Theresa, my 4E ranger, who was a force of nature. Honorable mention to Josef, the Tempest cleric, as well as Violet, the 5E version of Theresa. Favorite scenario? I only played about half of it, but Curse of Strahd - that is fantastic stuff. Biggest missed opportunity? Denis, my 5E paladin with the 7 Dex who got wiped out along with the rest of the party in the cultist's lair in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Next character? Honoria, a ranger, the first character made for 2024 rules - hopefully they've fixed the ranger, and given me room to play a ranger without her turning into dear old Theresa. We shall see. 

It's been a good 50 years for the game; a good 42 years for me playing it. 

Goodbye Old Friend

This is a very sad post. My poor old Cat Ringo died this week. She was, I must say, an avid gamer - just look at her!

Always in the middle of things.

And not just D&D, either: she loved Traveller - she loved Catan. She added something to every game, usually a sense of constant vigilance against playing the cat card and sending everything flying. 

Modeling the scout ship Jon built...

Sleeping in her very own Cat an box... 

We will miss her.

Year End Gaming Roundup

So if you asked, how could things get worse in 2020 - ha! well. I have a few posts on here, not completely abandoned. Still...

So - ignoring (as much as we can) the World Outside for a moment - how did this year go for gaming?

Well - you can't ignore the world entirely. The public games moved on line, but kept opn - more on that in a bit. We shut down playing at the house for a couple months, but started up again, and have proceeded intermittently. It has not been great, though; we play sometimes, but we have a hard time maintaining any momentum, and we end up talking about the games we aren't playing more than playing. We aren't playing other games all that much either, though we've made some progress there lately. It's been bad.

I could sum up things, like I have the last couple years, but the story is the same: Tomb of Annihilation - we managed a couple sessions in the summer, but that is all - we talk about it sometimes, but nothing has happened in ages. The Waterdeep and Jungle games are right where we left them, though both were sort of at good pausing places, two years ago. Sigh. We stopped the Saltmarsh home brew to play a city adventure - and have dropped both.

The home brew Waynesburg game went well - but I don't remember if that was late 2019 or the beginning of this year. It stopped, though it is there waiting. All fo these campaigns are there waiting - given the right combination of time and inspiration they could come back. Though sometimes having this many options is worse than only having one option.

The only home success this year was the Desert Campaign. The cleric owed a favor, so they headed off across the desert and hills to find out why the Hermitage fo St. Ignatius was not communicating any more. Off they went, fighting monsters and throwing boulders and gathering biuts of rumors until they arrived. A  village where everyone was paranoid; a missing baron, bandits and such; and something Bad at the old monastery. So they snuck in through the tunnels beneath the place, fighting various creatures, and getting into some big fights with drow int he cellars. Then that stalled out, a couple months ago. But it is there, and once it starts upwill flow pretty well. It is more combat oriented than I thought it was going to be - I thought there would be more intrigue leading up to some fine boss battles, but all the interruptions have pushed it to a more combat heavy game. That's the danger. But it works.

And? Outside of home - Princes of Apocalypse is still going, we are down to the last bunch of cults - we have shed a lot of the annoyances around that game, so things are all right. Though it is dragging - we are all starting to eye Rime fo the Ice Maiden with great anticipation.

A bunch fo us also got into a playing of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. I told you how that went.  The group then picked up playing Ghosts of Saltmarsh. One character has already had to be resurrected there. Only one! Rot grubs, this time.

So there you go. I suppose I could look on the bright side: we have two steady ongoing games, and a third that was going all right for much of the year, and should be again soon. Given the circumstances, that's not half bad.

It's been odd, though. The virus has kept us out of the game stores - I have not spent hundreds of dollars in minis and maps this year, and what I did spent, has been mostly for presents - a couple books given away, lots of minis, a map, and so on. That's good, though I miss having that stuff coming in all the time.  

I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about other games, especially Call of Cthulhu, which looks very interesting - but we have not gotten around to playing it. I don't know if we will - we are all more fantasy fans than horror, so the mythos isn't all that compelling. What I love are the skill systems and the settings - 20s and 30s - we are all fans of Hammett and Chandler, not to mention the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew - and I can add a lot of 20s/30s comic strips as well. Terry and the Pirates! Wash Tubbs! I love that stuff - I would love the play a game set in that era, which Call of Cthulhu is. We shall see.

And so: what are my goals for 2021? 

First - play. Keep playing the outside games, get our own games going. The last year or so I have run all the games at home - I hope the rest fo the gang gets in on that action. But playing regularly is the best comfoprt.

Second - I want to develop some things. Especially short, one off type adventurers, either simple scenarios for ongoing characters on pure one offs. We talk about this - I talk about it. I want to do it. We weretalking about doing it for Christmas - that's probably the way to do it. build them around specific scenes, environments, times, events. A Christmas game - a heist game - a ship board game - somethign contained. I did one a year or so ago - The Bard's Pants - that worked very well. Do more fo that.

Third - I want to work more with physical things. Pain my minis; build some terrain. We'll see. 

Finally - I should add that I have been working on World Anvil, here and there, in spurts usually - but I do it. Getting masses of Waynesburg information piled in there this week, when I should have been working on a Christmas one shot. Yeah, that's how it goes. But it is good. Keep that up.

And try to keep this up. We are notorious for sitting around the house talking about D&D - we have to work on getting that stuff into something like a published form. Even just a blog; or a lousy video, buncha middle aged nerds whining about lack of skill guidance in D&D 5E! I don't know. I will try, though I say that every year, and you can see how well I follow up on it.

Year End 2019

Hello world.

This has gone badly, huh? Here I started the year (or ended last year) talking about how I hoped to use this blog - and here I am, a year later and 3 posts later - what can I say? Life has, this time, complicated matters. Work has created odd scheduling issues that have made playing harder and more sporadic - which has spilled over into writing about playing, etc. Though last year we played plenty and I barely wrote anything, so I can't blame that. I can blame it for this:

Reviewing what we played last year I find:

• The Tomb of Annihilation game - mibght well be right where we left it. A couple more sessions - that has been very much neglected.
• The Waterdeep campaign - is right where we left it. We have a tavern, which we have cleaned out of its ghosts and squatters! what next?
• The Jungle Island game is right where we left it too.
• The Desert game, on the other hand, did go very well. A full on tomb raiding dungeon crawl, which ended with a wild fight with mummies and the like, then a rival gang of adventurers. The party is rich, though they have to move their ill-gotten gains to civilization. En route, they fought a gorgon, with dire results to the cleric.... This is the most likely of these campaigns to recover. It's got a great hook, it's got good characters and I even have a good idea how to proceed. This one should move ahead.

• Meanwhile, we have been playing in a Princes of the Apocalypse game at a game store for the last year and a half, still going strong, though sometimes going in circles. But it has been a success.

And this year, we have picked up a couple new ideas, though they have been marred by the reduced game time.

• The home brew city campaign - Waynesburg - generated a couple nice one off adventures ("The Bard's Pants"!), and now an ongoing mystery/adventure. That's worked all right, though it has been hard to maintain momentum, especially around the holidays. It has been interesting, a much more skill and talking based adventure, that I hope to maintain through the coming months.
• We started a campaign int he Saltmarsh area, out of that book - it was going all right, but ran out of steam, missing a month or so of playing... Scheduling has been a problem this year. Playing every other week instead of every week (unless something interrupts the weeks we would play) means it is very hard to have more than one thing going at a time. We could switch back and forth in previous years, and did. Now? we're stuck with one, really.

That is what it is. The only way to fic it is to find a better job.

In the meanwhile - once again, I do want to start using this blog. Writing something here. We talk enough about D&D; you'd think we could write something.

I also want to work on the World Anvil site: use it to build out the history and lore of our campaign world. Which, I confess, is a pretty generic world, but I made up the core sometime in the spring of 1982, so I am not going to apologize for it. What use it has, I don't know, but building it should help put the whole of it together in my head. Let's hope.

Otherwise? Another year - for all the gripes, we did play a lot this year, talked about playing a lot, continued to pump money into Wizard's fo the Coast and Wiz Kids and Paiso and whoever else is willing to sell me D&D related toys and gear. (Not to mention Papermate and Pilot and MMM and all the companies providing pencils, pens, paper, note cards... yeah.) So: the gaming vibe is still good, chez moi. I shall try, for my own satisfaction as much as the edification of the public, to post more here - we'll see.

Have a good new year anyway, gamers. May all your rolls be crits...

Adieu 2018!

Hello again. This is almost painful, posting here now. Looking back across the year: two years in a row I have begun the year with ambitious hopes for the upcoming - two years in a row, I have not accomplished any of it.

I take that back: hopes for the blog in the upcoming - that is what I have failed at. I have managed to play quite a bit this year: fairly regular sessions at home; I've joined a game at a game store, with some increased interaction outside the house - that has been good. We've put in a reasonable number of hours at the table; some of the home games have been a bit hit or miss, that could get better... But it's been a good year for playing.

For the home games - we were thinking about campaigns the other day - we currently have, what, going?

• Tomb of Annihilation, running online - which has a way of running for 3 weeks out of four, then disappearing for 3 months, as people have conflicts and such, and seem to struggle to get back together. But we did go up a river, fight various monsters, steal a shield guardian, convince a goblin queen that we were sent from the gods to make her their representative on earth, then head off into the jungle in search of - something.... It's been a while.
• Waterdeep Dragon Heist - we've played at that a few times, gotten to the point where we own our own tavern - it works all right.
• A jungle island campaign we started last year and played in spurts - this got interrupted, and in the interim, I got more interested in a desert campaign, so it has supplanted the jungle island one. But it is still alive, and able to be resumed at some point.
• A desert campaign, tomb raiding and the like - which is going strong at the moment. After crossing the desert, the adventurers have found the tomb in question, and have started raiding within. A dungeon crawl section of this campaign, though it has had a couple stages so far.

Besides this, we have played a few episodes in a couple things that might be a campaign if we played them more often. And we have been floating more ideas: a home brew city campaign, a new village campaign, a high level dragon hunt, among others. I'm not sure it's reasonable to keep anything like that many campaigns running at a time, but it would be nice to get some going. It's fun to shift gears once in a while - play different types of characters, different configurations, differing kinds of challenges. But as it is, we play enough, we manage to keep a couple things going - so it's all right.

Playing is good. And D&D development is not bad: I don't work as much on building campaigns and adventures as I should, but I do a fair amount of background building. And I write plenty - playing D&D has always hooked into fiction writing, and I have done plenty of that this year. So most of the things I hoped to do I have done. Just that none of it has made it to this blog. And too little of it has made it to the table, to be honest.

And so? while I will not be so bold as to promise or threaten or commit to anything like a post a month (let alone a post a week), or a video a month or anything wild like that - that is what I am after. To post things. To write about gaming - games, world building, ideas about D&D and other games - anything. Maybe even just comments on games - who knows. "Tangible form" - that is the key. Something in tangible form. One of these years I will manage it.

2018 Gaming Resolutions

Welcome to 2018, New Year's Day. As good a time as any to try to renew my attention to this blog - yep. I did this last year laying out goals - the goals I had for this blog got nowhere, but the rest?

Playing more? I moved, and yes indeed, I play a lot more. We have had some trouble getting a campaign established, but we have managed to play regularly - D&D and other games alike - so I have to take that as a win.

As for D&D - I did manage to run through the fire giant lair I referred to; I have worked up chunks of the jungle/south seas adventure, and played some of it,though it has been a bit hit or miss. That is all. I have not been able to turn any of this into anything tangible- but I created enough material around them, it is not off the table.

As for the background stuff - developing the world: I have continued working on that, as I have for decades. Some of this is quite tangible - lots of maps and such - some of it less so. But all of it is there. The problem with this is that it is all in my head, on my computer, or arranged in piles around the houses - I need to do something else with it. we'll be back tot his point...

As for blogging - no, fraid not. As for audio-visual - no, again. As for writing? yes - I have done a lot of that this year, though somehow managed not to finish a thing.

This is where I hope to change, and this is the whole of this year's resolutions. The general stuff - continues, take most of that stuff as ongoing... Keep playing. I have one campaign in decent shape; I hope to find one or two more that I can run - and hope I can get someone else to run, so I can play too (D&D specifically). Keep writing and all the rest. But specifically:

This year I am going to try to use this blog to start putting the background work - world building, especially, but dungeon building and the rest - into a tangible form. Published here, basically. I will set myself this modest goal: to post one piece every week related to the world building. Maybe sometimes something about other things - D&D theory or reports or observations or whatever - but something. And specifically, at least one post a week about the D&D world. Something - a post about a location; a piece of history; something about monsters or races or classes in this world; maybe something about its culture. One a week - I should be able to do it: I have a ton of material to use.

It's a modest goal, but it's a goal, and if I do it, it would generate 2/3 as many posts as we have managed in 7 years on this blog... It's not been that I don't do the writing - it's that I haven't published it (even in this kind of forum.) Time to start changing that.

Gaming Ambitions for 2017

Welcome, 2017. I want to write a bit about things I want to do this year, related to gaming. Always optimistic, but I think circumstances may make more of this possible this year: it is something to aspire to at any rate.

1. The obvious thing is the play. Online, in person, the usual suspects, and if possible, getting involved in other games - anything. This as player, DM, both, either - just being involved in games, more often - as close tsoweekly as possible - is going to make my life a good deal happier.

2. I specifically want to run. I have three adventures pretty well worked out in my head - I have to get them on paper (or the computer) and run them. I've talked about these enough: there's the Fire Giant thing we've been poking at the last couple months, with the Bono/Inky/Milo party... There's a pirate/jungle adventure I have been working on, and have a good deal of material for... and I want to redo the House on the Cliff adventure for 5th edition. Some in person, some online - work out which is convenient, and get on with it.

3. Related to that - I want to develop these adventures, and try to turn them into something concrete. Into artifacts (as they like to say) - to write them up and put them in a tangible form, that can be shared. I would like to get into the habit of doing this - not just with my ideas, but other people's. Work on publishing (however modest an audience we might have for these materials.) The act of creating them is the goal - anything more is gravy.

4. I also want to develop the world of our games. I have been playing for 35 years and almost from the beginning, I started making up a world to ply in. I have a ton of material - maps and stories and history and social and cultural essays and information - that I have never quite managed to get from my head (and my computer and piles of paper) to somewhere other people can use them. (Other than a few posts here.) I want to do this partly just to get it into tangible form, to have done something - but also to make it possible to develop it, as a group. For all the info I have, the world is bigger than my ideas of what is in it - it would work better if we could all work on it together. Whether adding areas to the core - developing areas I have done nothing more than drawn and named - or filling in what's there - the more the merrier, I think.

(I was thinking about this playing Storm King's Thunder: I don't care much about the Forgotten Realms - I mentally translate all those published worlds to my own, fit the towns onto my maps, or - sometimes - just tack their maps onto my maps.) Doing that could help us get this game going - but only if you can build up some kind of world of your own that you have some investment in. I need to get this thing into a form that can, in fact, be worked with...)

5. I definitely need to blog more. I have to get a post in here every month at least - every week if I could... at some point, it might be worth changing this to something more public, too - linking out and interacting with other blogs. Maybe not this one, since this tends to be rather insular, a conversation about how to play, specific to what we are playing - but something like it. But to do that, I think I need to have the material, and keep producing material... We'll see. But I still need to write here more.

6. I would like to try to get some kind of audio-visual thing going. A podcast, a video blog, something - whether conversations about the game, or gamecasts, or something else. This is another thing I don't quite think I'm ready to unleash on the wide world, but I want to start doing something like this. Figure out the logistics, the technology, figure out what you have to do to make these things good - and practice them.

(This is one of the areas where work is not helping: because things like that do come up there - but the material is so mind-numbingly awful, and the kind of hypercriticism that has become the norm is so maddening, doing some kind of presentation at work ends up not teaching you to speak in public, but making the thought of speaking in public horrifying. Every time I do something like that, I think about what I want to be talking about, and it drives me nuts. So I have to find a way to start doing those things on a topic that interests me. Like - D&D!)

7. Finally, I need to write. Obviously, some of this is included in the comments above - I need to write up adventures, write up the world (in a shareable form), write for the blog - but I also have to write fiction. I always have, of course - but I have to do two things I have not done: 1) I have to actually finish something - this would be a miracle... 2) I have to do it more openly. NaNoWriMo did this - talking about my project and others was very satisfying - and very helpful in keeping the story moving forward. I didn't finish it, no surprises there, but I passed 50,000 without rewriting it four times - that's a step in the right direction all my itself. So - in short: I want to work on stories - and talk about them, both the writing process and the actual stories. (This, I should say, also relates the world building, since I am mainly talking about fiction set in this D&D world.)

And that is it - for now anyway. I could be really ambitious, start talking about all the things I want to do: Build Models! Publish! watch more video stuff! get involved in other people's games! - but that might be a bit much. If I can do the 7 things above - not well, or bringing anything to a conclusion, just doing them - that will be an excellent start, something to build on...